The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office has awarded Microsoft a patent for its Songsmith technology.

Songsmith was originally unveiled at CES 2009. The software generates musical accompaniment to match a singer's voice. Just choose a musical style, sing into your PC's microphone, and Songsmith will create backing music for you. Then share your songs with your friends and family, post your songs online, or create your own music videos.

On Tuesday, TechFlash reports that the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office granted Microsoft with a patent entitled "Automatic accompaniment for vocal melodies." The patent wording is:

A method for generating an accompaniment for a recorded audio melody includes providing a recorded audio melody that includes segments; performing a frequency analysis of the recorded audio melody; summing the total duration of each fundamental frequency within a segment of the melody; based on the summing, computing a probability for each possible chord for each segment; based on the computed probabilities, selecting a set of chords for the segments; and outputting the set of chords as an accompaniment for the recorded audio melody.